I read an article at Pretty Much Amazing! about the Hype Machine‘s influence on the music industry, and while I strongly disagree with a lot of the points in the post, it inspired me to launch this new feature.
This new feature, The Doggy Bag, is going to be about all the things I don’t really have the time to blog during the week, and my idea is to try and collect these thoughts in this feature during the weekends. This post will be about the Hype Machine’s influence on the music business and the return of old-fashioned values.
As blogs are getting more and more popular, the Hype Machine becomes an increasingly important tool in the hunt for new music. It’s also hard to argue against the decrease in music sales and as the music industry sees their business crumble in their hands, a negative reaction towards blogs is close to inevitable. After all, we’re distributing music that we don’t always have the right to post, we’re posting about tracks that often aren’t released yet and so on. But does that mean that the we are the ones ruining the music industry? As I see it, that’s not the case.
The Hype Machine has to be one of the biggest opportunities for the music industry today, but the digital age reinforces the importance of responsibility. Yeah yeah, responsibility sounds so old fashioned today, but I guess you have to turn to old fashioned values when facing new technology.
I’m sure I would be able to maintain a pretty big music collection only by checking the Hype Machine’s Popular feature a couple of times a day and staying updated with a handful of blogs, but to be honest that doesn’t really satisfy me as a listener. In my humble (and maybe old fashioned) opinion, music is more than the 5 minute thrill of that new Soulwax remix or whatever’s on top of the Hype Machine chart. Yes, I do blog a lot about that kind of tracks and I’m not saying they’re worth less than original tracks or anything, but the music that stands out to me is more than just a stream or a simple mp3.
A lot of my greatest musical journeys started on the Hype Machine. I probably never would have discovered LCD Soundsystem, Crystal Castles, Justice or Hercules and Love Affair if I hadn’t pulled down that mp3 from a trustworthy blog. So am I a bad person for doing so? Am I just leeching on the effort of others to get a free thrill? Should I just have stopped at Blind and forgot about the rest of the album? Should DFA have pinned me for illegally downloading one of their tracks?
Well, today I own the cd (yes, an actual tangible object), I’ve purchased their digital single and I saw them live earlier this year. The same thing goes for most of the other artists. Hell, I even own some of the albums on both cd and vinyl. I paid for that In Rainbows box set. I even paid for Feed The Animals, I must be crazy, right? I may just be patting my own back right now, but my point is that the internet, and the Hype Machine in particular, creates opportunities that we are only just beginning to understand.
And does it really kill the process of music writing? It may be destroying the process of reading about music for some spoiled kids only out to grab the mp3s at the end of the post, but come on there’s more to it… I don’t think the music writing community has ever been more vibrant than it is today. Take a look at the list of blogs on the Hype Machine. All these blogs represent people eager to write about music, people who care so much about music that they want to share it with the rest of the world. Never mind that a lot of freeloaders are just grabbing the tracks, as I see it, the music writing community is as busy as ever.
The Hype Machine hasn’t killed the way I enjoy music, but I admit that it has changed the way we look at music. Though it may seem as though my opinion is very clear, I think it’s hard to define the Hype Machine as either good or bad. But if there is one thing that’s certain, it’s that the Hype Machine is here to stay and the music will keep on flowing through it. And I’m going to be there, keeping an eye out for all those great artists I have yet to discover.
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